Utilization of CO2 for Ethylene Oxide

The objective of this work was to investigate the effects of two different oxidizing agents [nitrous oxide (N2O) and air], compared to the reported pure oxygen (O2), on the ethylene epoxidation performance in a low-temperature parallel plate dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) system with two frosted glass plates as the dielectric barrier material under ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure. A separate feed technique, with the ethylene (C2H4) feed position fraction of 0.5, was used to reduce all the undesirable reactions and to maximize the ethylene oxide (EO) production (selectivity and yield). The N2O system with a N2O/C2H4 feed molar ratio of 0.17:1 exhibited the highest ethylene epoxidation performance (80.1% EO selectivity and 21.9% EO yield) with a very low carbon monoxide selectivity and the lowest power consumption, as compared to pure O2 and air as oxidant systems at their respective optimal feed molar ratios of 0.2:1 and 0.1:1, respectively. Interestingly, the EO yield from the DBD system ...

The electrochemical synthesis of ethylene oxide (EO) using ethylene and water under ambient conditions presents a low‐carbon alternative to existing industrial production process. Yet, the electrocatalytic ethylene epoxidation route is currently hindered by largely insufficient activity, EO selectivity, and long‐term stability. Here we report a single atom Ru‐doped hollandite structure KIr4O8 (KIrRuO) nanowire catalyst for efficient EO production via a chloride‐mediated ethylene epoxidation process. The KIrRuO catalyst exhibits an EO partial current density up to 0.7 A cm−2 and an EO yield as high as 92.0 %. The impressive electrocatalytic performance towards ethylene epoxidation is ascribed to the modulation of electronic structures of adjacent Ir sites by single Ru atoms, which stabilizes the *CH2CH2OH intermediate and facilitates the formation of active Cl2 species during the generation of 2‐chloroethanol, the precursor of EO. This work provides a single atom modulation strategy for improving the reactivity of adjacent metal sites in heterogeneous electrocatalysts.

This article is devoted to the consideration of methods for the industrial production of ethylene oxide. Ethylene oxide is produced in large quantities and is primarily used as an intermediate in the production of a number of industrial chemicals, the best known of which is ethylene glycol. The process of producing ethylene oxide is carried out by a direct vapor-phase oxidation process, in which ethylene is oxidized to ethylene oxide by air or oxygen and a silver catalyst at 10-30 atm (1–3 MPa) and 200-300 °C. Ethylene oxidation can be carried out in several ways: air, oxygen under nitrogen ballast, oxygen under methane ballast. The production of ethylene oxide is one of the most dynamically developing. In Russia, the leading place in the production of ethylene oxide is occupied by the enterprise PJSC Nizhnekamskniftekhim. In 2012, the installation for producing ethylene oxide was reconstructed. The reconstruction consisted of transferring the ethylene oxide synthesis stage to methane ballast conditions. A patent analysis was carried out to determine the relevance of this process.

Ethylene oxide (EO) is a key chemical intermediate produced almost exclusively from petrochemically derived ethylene. Currently, EO manufacturing involves epoxidation of ethylene with O2 over Ag/Al2O3 - one of the highest CO2-emitting processes in the chemical sector (Boulamanti and Moya, 2017). The flammability hazards associated with incumbent methods and sluggish process start-ups prevent small-scale, flexible operations or alignment with intermittently available renewable resources. Presented herein is a novel process for on-demand production of bio-EO from bioethanol. Ethanol, laboratory-grade or denatured, was first dehydrated to ethylene over HZSM-5 (at 280 °C) or γ-Al2O3 (at 350 °C) catalysts, producing ethylene and water. The ethylene stream was then selectively oxidised to EO over Ag/SrFeO3 at 270 °C using lattice oxygen from a solid – SrFeO3, employed to drive chemical looping epoxidation (CLE). For a configuration where the dehydration and epoxidation reactions were carried out in separate reactors, the process produced EO with 57 % selectivity at 15 % conversion of ethylene, thus exceeding the incumbent approach with pure Ag/α-Al2O3 and O2. In an alternative configuration, experiments were carried out in one dehydration-epoxidation reactor layered with two catalysts: HZSM-5 and Ag/SrFeO3. The results revealed that water presence at a percentage level enhanced unselective combustion. In-situ removal of water, possible with an additional layer of a drying material between the two catalysts, proved effective in boosting the process performance, reaching selectivity to EO of 50 % at 12 % conversion of ethylene. The catalysts showed no sign of deactivation when using denatured ethanol or when performing experiments intermittently. Hence, our novel process can be kept offline without penalty, allowing for on demand production and complete alignment with renewable resources.

This research has been performed in the Ethylene Oxide production process. It is a flammable and colorless gas at temperatures above 11 °C. It is an important commodity chemical for the production of solvents, antifreeze, textiles, detergents, adhesives, polyurethane foam, and pharmaceuticals. Small amounts of Ethylene Oxide [EO] are used in manufacturing fumigants and sterilants for spices and cosmetics, as well as hospital sterilization for surgical equipment. Modern Ethylene oxide [EO] productions employ either air or oxygen (O2)to oxidize ethylene (C2H4) with a silver catalyst on an alumina oxide carrier[Ag/Al2O3]catalyst packed in a fixed-bed reactor (plug-flow reactor)but the oxygen-base reaction process is more desirable here we used oxygen. Mainly two reactions occur, partial oxidation of ethylene to ethylene oxide and total oxidation of ethylene to carbon dioxide and water. The design models of the process in this research based on a three-part system. They are: the reaction system, absorption system and Ethylene Oxide [EO] purification system. The largest cost in production of ethylene oxide is ethylene therefore, it’s important to optimize the selectivity towards ethylene oxide and thus reduce the consumption of Ethylene. The aim of this work is to create a simulation model of the Ethylene Oxide production process from Ethylene using Aspen Hysys V9. Also to knowing the optimum operational conditions (temperature –pressure –flow rate) for the oxidation reactions of Ethylene. The simulation was running three times with various operational conditions to make a good result. The conclusion was that during operational time the activation energy increased for both reactions which have to be compensated with increasing reactor temperature. At the same time the selectivity for producing Ethylene Oxide decreases, i.e. more carbon dioxide and water are formed. The simulation models yield Ethylene Oxide with purity of 99.2%.

Fixed-bed reactors are widely employed in industrial processes such as ethylene oxide production. Traditional multiobjective optimization typically requires repeated evaluations of a large number of candidate designs, making it time-consuming and computationally expensive. This study introduces a physics-informed DeepONet framework for multi-objective prediction. The model encodes catalyst geometric parameters via a multilayer perceptron (branch net) and processes 3D spatial coordinates using a convolutional neural network (trunk net) to extract spatial features. To ensure physical consistency, mass conservation constraints are embedded in the loss function. The proposed framework effectively captures the nonlinear mapping between 3D structural parameters and flow fields, achieving much higher accuracy compared to purely data-driven models. Coupled with a genetic algorithm, it enables the efficient identification of optimal geometries, resulting in improvements of 23.46% in ethylene conversion and 1.46% in ethylene oxide yield compared with the base case operating point, thereby facilitating practical advancements in industrial reactor design and optimization.

Ethylene oxide (EO), a valuable chemical feedstock in producing many industrial chemicals, which is industrially produced by the partial oxidation of ethylene, so-called ethylene epoxidation, has been of great interest in many global research studies. In this work, the epoxidation of ethylene under a low-temperature dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) was feasibly investigated to find the best operating conditions. It was experimentally found that the EO yield decreased with increasing O2/C2H4 feed molar ratio, feed flow rate, input frequency, and electrode gap distance, while it increased with increasing applied voltage up to 19 kV. The highest EO yield of 5.6% was obtained when an input frequency of 500 Hz and an applied voltage of 19 kV were used, with an O2/C2H4 feed molar ratio of 1:1, a feed flow rate of 50 cm3/min, and an electrode gap distance of 10 mm. Under these best conditions, the power consumption was found to be as low as 6.07 × 10−16 Ws/molecule of EO produced.

The chemical looping epoxidation (CLE) of ethylene was performed over an Ag catalyst supported on strontium ferrite perovskite (SrFeO3-δ). CLE consists of a reduction step in ethylene where oxygen is transferred from the support to the Ag catalyst to form ethylene oxide (EO), and a separate regeneration step, in which the support is reoxidised in air. The effect of altering the reduction and oxidation times was investigated, analysing changes in the conversion of ethylene and selectivity to EO. Experiments were conducted at 270 °C in a packed bed of Ag(15 wt.%)/SrFeO3-δ with a gas hourly space velocity of 9600 h−1 and a total operation time > 40 h. When the time of the reduction step was increased from 1 to 3 min, selectivity to EO only decreased by 0.4%, demonstrating that CLE can run with prolonged reduction times while maintaining high selectivity. Increased duration of the reoxidation step resulted in both selectivity and conversion increasing, but when varying the oxidation time from 10 to 15 min, the overall improvement in the performance was minimal; thus, CLE can feasibly operate at shortened oxidation times. By increasing the pressure during the oxidation step to 2.5 bar, the duration of the reoxidation step was further shortened to 5 min without impacting the CLE performance. With 1.5 min reduction and 5 min reoxidation steps, a CLE installation producing EO in a pseudo-steady manner would require 4 packed bed reactors operating in parallel. The role of Ag2O in the CLE process was also investigated, demonstrating that the oxide was not selective towards EO.

Objective To analyze the reasons and basic steps of thylene oxide sterilization of 2 cases with choledochoscopy sterilization in ethylene oxide failure.We found out that some materials powerful absorbability to ethylene oxide,such as residual Chlorine-containing disinfectant and liquid in the lumens of cleaned choledochoscopy,and the surface layer of choledkchoscopy,incorrect packaging,mounting method were all the factors causing sterilization failed.According to above factors that caused sterilization failed,we adjusted and improved technical operations targeted,standardize the management process to strictly enforce endoscopics cleaning,packaging and sterilization mounting,and enhanced staff knowledge of disinfection and trainings to avoid those kind of sterilization failures,and then improved the ethylene oxide sterilization quality of surgical endoscopics,to prevent nosocomial infections,and ensure the safety of clinical surgery. Key words: Choledochoscopy; Ethylene oxide; Sterilization failure

The Clean Air Act of 1990 listed 187 air toxics that USEPA is required to control to protect public health. To uncover the spatial and temporal trends in air toxic emissions and identify higher contributing emission sources and chemicals to the total inhalation cancer risk in Illinois, we assessed USEPA’s National Emissions Inventory (NEI) data. We also analyzed the data of USEPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA), which estimates inhalation cancer risk and non-cancer risks across the U.S. on census tract level. In addition, due to the prominence of diesel PM as agent that is “likely to be human carcinogen” and lack of diesel PM cancer and non-cancer risk estimates under NATA, we calculated diesel PM cancer and non-cancer risks using California EPA-developed toxicity values. We assessed spatial distribution of diesel PM and select air toxics (those which contribute most to cancer and non-cancer risks) in Cook County, IL, to support inhalation exposure and health risk mitigation efforts and guide environmental justice and health disparities research and policy. Based on our findings, Cook County, IL, is consistently the county that contributes the most to the total air emissions in Illinois in 1999, 2002, 2005, 2011 and 2014 followed by counties near it like DuPage County, Lake County, and Will County, which are more urbanized counties in Illinois. In terms of spatial and temporal distribution of NATA datasets, all the total inhalation cancer risk areas in Cook County, IL, which excludes the contribution from diesel PM, were in the acceptable range (10^-6 - 10^-4) but the inhalation cancer risk of those higher areas were close to the edge of being above the acceptable range. “On-road” emission was the greatest contributor to total inhalation cancer risk in Cook County, IL, among all studied years. Top three chemicals contributing to 2014 total inhalation cancer risk estimates in Cook County are ethylene oxide, benzene, and formaldehyde in the descending order. The spatial distribution of ethylene oxide inhalation cancer risk estimates in Cook County census tracts aligns well with that for the total inhalation excess cancer risk estimates for Cook County in 2014. This provides the evidence for the critical role that the facilities emitting ethylene oxide into the atmosphere play in cancer risk estimates locally. Most diesel PM excess cancer risk estimates in Cook County were above USEPA’s acceptable range (10^-6 to 10^-4), which is a significant public health concern. The mobile sources in urban areas in Cook County contributed the most to the diesel PM inhalation excess cancer risks. This is visually depicted with higher diesel PM cancer risks along major highways in the region in GIS maps of diesel PM cancer risks from 1999-2011. In terms of respiratory non-cancer risk analysis, acrolein, diesel PM, and formaldehyde are the highest contributing air toxics to the total respiratory non-cancer risk in Cook County, 2014, however, the respiratory non-cancer risks were all within the acceptable range per USEPA guidelines (i.e., hazard quotient less than unity).

This paper demonstrates the preparation of polyethersulfone (PES) ultrafiltration (UF) membranes via wet phase inversion method using either poly(ethylene oxide)-b-poly(propylene oxide)-b- poly(ethylene oxide) (Pluronic ® , Plu) or polyethylene glycol (PEG) as hydrophilic modifier. Their effects on membrane structure as well as the resulting membrane performance and their stability in membrane polymer matrix were systematically investigated. The investigated membrane characteristics include surface hydrophilicity (by contact angle), surface chemistry (by FTIR spectroscopy) and water flux measurement . Visualization of membrane surface and cross section morphology was also done by scanning electron microscopy. The membrane performance was examined by investigation of adsorptive fouling and ultrafiltration using solution of bovine serum albumin as the model system. The stability of additive was examined by incubating the membrane in water (40 o C) for up to 10 days. The results show that modification effects on membrane characteristic and low fouling behavior were clearly observed. Further, amphiphilic Pluronic generally showed better performance than PEG.

Nanocrystalline transition metal oxides and their composites with reduced graphene oxide and carbon nanotubes for photocatalytic applications

Conventional amphiphilic block copolymers are macromolecules consisting of at least a hydrophilic segment covalently attached to a hydrophobic segment. They are unique and versatile building blocks in supramolecular polymer chemistry, both for the generation of highly organized, self-assembled structures and for the structural control of material interfaces. In the absence of solvents, the phase-behavior of block-copolymers is sparingly described. In aqueous solutions block copolymers self-assemble into nanoscopic objects. These structures are gaining more and more attention for technical formulations. Self-assembly is simply induced by dissolving dry powder of amphiphilic copolymers in water. This self-assembly process, however, cannot be described solely based on bulk phase behavior and very few experimental phase diagrams of block copolymer/water mixtures have been reported. In order to control, predict and eventually achieve a comprehensive understanding of this process and in particular the formation of vesicles, worm/rod-like micelles and spherical micelles it is important to systematically investigate the phase behavior of block copolymers across the whole water concentration range. We therefore undertook investigations of the self-assembly of two block copolymers. Preliminary encapsulation studies reveal their potential for applications relevant for drug delivery. 
\nThe concentration profile of the identified amphiphilic block-copolymers diluted in aqueous solution was examined across the whole concentration range with four poly(ethylene oxide)-block-poly(γ-methyl-ε-caprolactone) (PEO-b-PMCL) block copolymers keeping the hydrophilic block length constant but varying the hydrophobic lengths. Bulk polymers did not display any ordered morphology. With increasing water concentrations the polymers underwent transitions from lamellar phases to packed vesicles and eventually all polymers self-assembled into vesicles in dilute aqueous solutions. At high concentration the largest polymer organized further into an inverse hexagonal phase prior to self-assembly into a lamellar phase. The smallest block-copolymer also self-aggregated into rod-like micelles and exhibited a hexagonal phase between the packing of the rod-like micelles/vesicles and the lamellar phase.
\nThe concentration profile of phases assembled by amphiphilic block-copolymers diluted in aqueous solution was examined as well across the whole concentration range with three poly(isobutylene)-block-poly(ethylene oxide) block copolymers having the same hydrophobic block length but varying in their hydrophilic lengths. In contrast to PEO-b-PMCL these polymers self-aggregated depending on the hydrophilic length into micelles, worm-like micelles and for the shortest polymer into vesicles. Thus, increasing the polymer concentration lead to a different phase behavior. The largest polymer which solely formed micelles, underwent transitions from packed micelles with a few packed worm-like micelles to a hexagonal phase and finally into a lamellar phase, in contrary to the middle length polymer, which self-aggregated into worm-like micelles. The best to our knowledge, it is the first time that an experimental phase diagram is built such that it displays the formation of worm/rod-like micelles. With the composition studied in here, the worms, with increasing polymer concentration, pack and undergo afterwards into a hexagonal and finally a lamellar phase has been observed. For the shortest polymer the phase behavior was similar to that of vesicles self-assembled by PEO-b-PMCL. In contrast, the pure polymer formed an inverse hexagonal phase.
\nIt was eventually shown that PEO23-PMCl32 can be used to encapsulate both small and large molecules. By adjusting the pH towards acidic conditions the responsiveness of the vesicles could be triggered to release the encapsulated material.

Catalytic fast Co-Pyrolysis of sewage sludge−sawdust using mixed metal oxides modified with ZSM-5 catalysts on dual-catalysts for product upgrading

A comparative study on the electrocatalytic efficiency of coupled (CuO-Co3O4) vs. mixed (CuCo2O4) metal oxides: Probed by hydrazine oxidation and sensitive determination